After 99% of human life is wiped out by climate disaster, the ultra wealthy have moved to the Tesla colonies of Mars. The Earth is now nothing more than a crazy golf course for the bourgeois and bored.
You play as one such lone golfer who's back on Earth for one last round.
In between putts, you’ll piece together the fall of humanity at the hands of consumerism, Silicon Valley culture, and ecological disaster through the narrative, custom radio show style soundtrack, and environmental storytelling.
Golf Club: Wasteland was originally released as a mobile game for Android and iOS back in 2018 but has since been delisted/removed from sale (it was $2.99).
Created by Polish developers Demagog Studio and published by Untold Tales, it's now about to see a new lease of life on Xbox, Playstation, Switch and PC.
So it's it any good?
Kind of... It's an interesting title that left me ultimately divided on if I enjoyed it enough to recommend.
To start out with it's a really novel concept. Although the press releases seem to make out this is a game based around the impact of environmental disaster, it didn't really delve into any issues other than being a vehicle to set the scene as earth being a golf course.
Initially I was taken in by the art style, the use of colour and focal depth to convey solitude and devastation, while keeping a crisp and clean play area. However half way through the game it was clear this aesthetic wasn't going to change at all and it became dull and repetitive.
In fact you could apply that as a metaphor for the entire game.
Pretty much anything I found interesting in the first half of the game became annoying, repetitive and even frustrating in the latter half.
This happened almost exactly half way though my playthrough as I remember checking the menu to see how much more a had left to wade through. 18 of 35 "courses" to my dismay.
You basically just have to hit the ball into the hole under par. Exactly like golf, only here they're are some environmental hazards and verticality at play.
Controls are simple, move the right stick in the direction you want to hit the ball and the distance from the center resting point of the stick to the outer edge dictates how hard you hit it.
Although you can somewhat adjust the sensitivity, this control method isn't great and your experience will vary depending on your controller, playing position and hand fatigue. It gets frustrating very quickly. Much better, in my opinion, would have been a simple 2 step approach of set direction, set power.
Onto the audio! The game does have a really nice soundtrack, some really nice low fi tracks to accompany your game.
But, at half-time they mess it all up again. The gentle tracks start to be more and more punctuated with stories from Mars.
While I get what they are trying to do, create a faux radio station that tells the back story, it doesn't really do that. It just replaces nice, sedate backing music with people complaining in a monotone drawl about shit that I personally didn't care about. I'm here to play wasteland golf dammit, not listen to Greta fucking Thunberg bleating about the weather.
There are some neat secrets to unlock by interacting with the environments but the game just doesn't progress, change or do enough to hold interest.
The courses pretty much all look the same, just introduce greater distances, more obstacles and more frustration the further in you get.
I genuinely lost interest on course 20 and from there on in just hit the ball until I was far enough over part to be able to skip to the next course and finish the game.
Golf Club: Wasteland is available 3rd September on all formats priced at $9.99.
Personally I think it would have been perfect at half the price and half the size it just doesn't have enough variety to sustain 35 courses.
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